Published  in 1839, 22 years before the outbreak of the U.S. Civil War, Crania Americana is an  extraordinarily rare book in any condition. Criticized in this modern, somewhat more enlightened age,  for its early 19th Century views on race, the publication of Crania Americana did provide important early steps toward the modern science of  physical anthropology.

Rare and expensive, many of the surviving books are in pretty bad shape.  A combination of age and the stresses put on the binding due to its large size makes opening an original a crap shoot for additional damage.  As expected, foxing (brown areas on the paper) and degradation of the binding and pages can be expected and may be extreme in many examples.   Some pages, such as the plates, are typically foxed and stained much more heavily than text pages. 

<<=== The page on the left has an average amount of foxing and ink from one of  the plates has also transferred to this page which adds to the degraded appearance. 

On the right, the same page  after restoration. ===>>>

"From a careful study of this body of artifacts, their position in the graves, and their association with each other, the conviction has grown that all of these antler hooks are the distal ends of atlatls. All of the antler sections are handles, attached to the proximal end of the atlatl, and the "banner" stones, subrectangular bars, and composit shell artifacts are all atatl weights.”  

As a teenager in the mid-1960's my uncle took me to meet one of the foremost collectors of artifacts in Ohio who was a friend of his.  While looking at his collection of bannerstones I mentioned that I had read somewhere of them being used as altatl weights.  His response was that atlatls had been found in caves in the Southwest but not in the East, so there was no evidence of this.  Little did I realize at that time that a definitive study of their use as weights had been published 20 years previously by William S, Webb of the University of Kentucky.   The in-situ finds of atlatl handles, weights and hooks left little doubt of their aboriginal use.

We are  very fortunate that the Moore excavations did not destroy this site and that Webb was able to recover some of the most compelling evidence of the use and construction of the atlatl in the Eastern United States.